If you are interested in the history of ideas in J, you can read some of papers in http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Bibliography In particular,
Falkoff and Iverson, The Design of APL, 1973. Falkoff and Iverson, The Evolution of APL, 1978. Iverson, A Personal View of APL, 1991. The last paper begins thus: It is now 35 years since Professor Howard Aiken instituted a computer science program at Harvard, a program that he called _Automatic Data Processing_. It is almost that long since I began to develop, for use in writing and teaching in that program, the programming language that has come to be known as APL. ... Because my formal education was in mathematics, the fundamental notions in APL have been drawn largely from mathematics. In particular, the notions of arrays, functions, and operators were adopted at the outset, as illustrated by the following excerpt from _A Programming Language_. ... [I believe the computer science program mentioned in the opening paragragh is the first such program anywhere, anytime.] ----- Original Message ----- From: Terrence Brannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Friday, April 6, 2007 7:46 am Subject: [Jgeneral] Executive Overview of J - Arrays as the most viable data structure > I was sitting here in front of an Excel spreadsheet, thinking, "you > know this is an array" ... not too long ago I was looking at a > database table and thinking the same thing. > > HOWEVER. isn't a tree the most general data structure? You can make > lists out of trees and make arrays out of lists. Therefore the most > fundamental and broadly applicable data structure is a tree and > not an > array. > > Any feedback on why J is an array processing language and how it might > handle tree/hierarchical data is appreciated. > > And how good is J with infinite data structures/streams? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
